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Search indexed NASA NTRS and DOE OSTI research on propulsion, heat transfer, battery materials and energy systems. Follow report and document links to the original sources.

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At least 379 records · Page 21

MemHC: An Optimized GPU Memory Management Framework for Accelerating Many-body Correlation

The many-body correlation function is a fundamental computation kernel in modern physics computing applications, e.g., Hadron Contractions in Lattice quantum chromodynamics (QCD). This kernel is both computation and memory intensive, involving a series of tensor contractions, and thus usually runs on accelerators like GPUs. Existing optimizations on many-body correlation mainly focus on individual tensor contractions (e.g., cuBLAS libraries and others). In contrast, this work discovers a new optimization dimension for many-body correlation by exploring the optimization opportunities among tensor contractions. More specifically, it targets general GPU architectures (both NVIDIA and AMD) and optimizes many-body correlation’s memory management by exploiting a set of memory allocation and communication redundancy elimination opportunities: first, GPU memory allocation redundancy: the intermediate output frequently occurs as input in the subsequent calculations; second, CPU-GPU communication redundancy: although all tensors are allocated on both CPU and GPU, many of them are used (and reused) on the GPU side only, and thus, many CPU/GPU communications (like that in existing Unified Memory designs) are unnecessary; third, GPU oversubscription: limited GPU memory size causes oversubscription issues, and existing memory management usually results in near-reuse data eviction, thus incurring extra CPU/GPU memory communications.

97 MATHEMATICS AND COMPUTING↗

Extending SST vanadis to Add SIMT Functional Units

Sandia National Laboratories is currently investigating scalable architectural simulation capabilities, with a focus on simulating and evaluating highly scalable supercomputers for high-performance computing applications. This exploration is driven by the shift toward more specialized forms of compute and the need for a more diverse set of accurate models. This project will explore the use of General-Purpose Graphical Processing Units (GPGPUs) in high-performance computing using both physical systems and new simulator models – traditional GPUs as well as tightly-coupled SIMT accelerators.

97 MATHEMATICS AND COMPUTING↗

A Computed Tomography Automation Architecture Developed from a Comprehensive Literature Review

This paper presents a literature review on techniques related to the computed tomography procedure that incorporate automation elements in their research investigations or industrial applications. Computed tomography (CT) is a non-destructive testing (NDT) technique in that the imaging and inspection are performed without damaging the sample, allowing for additional or repeated analysis if necessary. The reviewed literature is organized based on the steps associated with a general NDT task in order to define an end-to-end computed tomography automation architecture. The process steps include activities prior to image collection, during the scan, and after the data are collected. It further reviews efforts related to repeating this process based on a previous scan result. By analyzing the multiple existing but disparate efforts found in the literature, we present a framework for fully automating NDT procedures and discuss the remaining technical gaps in the developed framework.

46 INSTRUMENTATION RELATED TO NUCLEAR SCIENCE AND ↗

Geant4 Computing Performance Benchmarking and Monitoring

Performance evaluation and analysis of large scale computing applications is essential for optimal use of resources. As detector simulation is one of the most compute intensive tasks and Geant4 is the simulation toolkit most widely used in contemporary high energy physics (HEP) experiments, it is important to monitor Geant4 through its development cycle for changes in computing performance and to identify problems and opportunities for code improvements. All Geant4 development and public releases are being profiled with a set of applications that utilize different input event samples, physics parameters, and detector configurations. Results from multiple benchmarking runs are compared to previous public and development reference releases to monitor CPU and memory usage. Observed changes are evaluated and correlated with code modifications. Besides the full summary of call stack and memory footprint, a detailed call graph analysis is available to Geant4 developers for further analysis. The set of software tools used in the performance evaluation procedure, both in sequential and multi-threaded modes, include FAST, IgProf and Open|Speedshop. In conclusion, the scalability of the CPU time and memory performance in multi-threaded application is evaluated by measuring event throughput and memory gain as a function of the number of threads for selected event samples.

97 MATHEMATICS AND COMPUTING↗

A Simple XML Producer-Consumer Protocol

There are many different projects from government, academia, and industry that provide services for delivering events in distributed environments. The problem with these event services is that they are not general enough to support all uses and they speak different protocols so that they cannot interoperate. We require such interoperability when we, for example, wish to analyze the performance of an application in a distributed environment. Such an analysis might require performance information from the application, computer systems, networks, and scientific instruments. In this work we propose and evaluate a standard XML-based protocol for the transmission of events in distributed systems. One recent trend in government and academic research is the development and deployment of computational grids. Computational grids are large-scale distributed systems that typically consist of high-performance compute, storage, and networking resources. Examples of such computational grids are the DOE Science Grid, the NASA Information Power Grid (IPG), and the NSF Partnerships for Advanced Computing Infrastructure (PACIs). The major effort to deploy these grids is in the area of developing the software services to allow users to execute applications on these large and diverse sets of resources. These services include security, execution of remote applications, managing remote data, access to information about resources and services, and so on. There are several toolkits for providing these services such as Globus, Legion, and Condor. As part of these efforts to develop computational grids, the Global Grid Forum is working to standardize the protocols and APIs used by various grid services. This standardization will allow interoperability between the client and server software of the toolkits that are providing the grid services. The goal of the Performance Working Group of the Grid Forum is to standardize protocols and representations related to the storage and distribution of performance data. These standard protocols and representations must support tasks such as profiling parallel applications, monitoring the status of computers and networks, and monitoring the performance of services provided by a computational grid. This paper describes a proposed protocol and data representation for the exchange of events in a distributed system. The protocol exchanges messages formatted in XML and it can be layered atop any low-level communication protocol such as TCP or UDP Further, we describe Java and C++ implementations of this protocol and discuss their performance. The next section will provide some further background information. Section 3 describes the main communication patterns of our protocol. Section 4 describes how we represent events and related information using XML. Section 5 describes our protocol and Section 6 discusses the performance of two implementations of the protocol. Finally, an appendix provides the XML Schema definition of our protocol and event information.

Smith, Warren↗

Gaussian Process Regression under Computational and Epistemic Misspecification

Gaussian process regression is a classical kernel method for function estimation and data interpolation. In large data applications, computational costs can be reduced using low-rank or sparse approximations of the kernel. This paper investigates the effect of such kernel approximations on the interpolation error. We introduce a unified framework to analyze Gaussian process regression under important classes of computational misspecification: Karhunen-Loève expansions that result in low-rank kernel approximations, multiscale wavelet expansions that induce sparsity in the covariance matrix, and finite element representations that induce sparsity in the precision matrix. Furthermore, our theory also accounts for epistemic misspecification in the choice of kernel parameters.

Gaussian process regression↗

Application Experiences on a GPU-Accelerated Arm-based HPC Testbed

This paper assesses and reports the experience of ten teams working to port, validate, and benchmark several High Performance Computing applications on a novel GPU-accelerated Arm testbed system. The testbed consists of eight NVIDIA Arm HPC Developer Kit systems, each one equipped with a server-class Arm CPU from Ampere Computing and two data center GPUs from NVIDIA Corp. The systems are connected together using InfiniBand interconnect. The selected applications and mini-apps are written using several programming languages and use multiple accelerator-based programming models for GPUs such as CUDA, OpenACC, and OpenMP offloading. Working on application porting requires a robust and easy-to-access programming environment, including a variety of compilers and optimized scientific libraries. The goal of this work is to evaluate platform readiness and assess the effort required from developers to deploy well-established scientific workloads on current and future generation Arm-based GPU-accelerated HPC systems. The reported case studies demonstrate that the current level of maturity and diversity of software and tools is already adequate for large-scale production deployments.

Elwasif, Wael↗

Joint-space Lyapunov-based direct adaptive control of a kinematically redundant telerobot manipulator

This paper presents the design of a joint-space adaptive control scheme for controlling the slave arm motion of a dual-arm telerobot system developed at Goddard Space Flight Center (GSFC) to study telerobotic operations in space. Each slave arm of the dual-arm system is a kinematically redundant manipulator with seven degrees of freedom (DOF). Using the concept of model reference adaptive control (MRAC) and Liupunov direct method, we derive an adaptation algorithm that adjusts the PD controller gains of the control scheme. The development of the adaptive control scheme assumes that the slave arm motion is non-compliant and slowly varying. The implementation of the derived control scheme does not require the computation of manipulator dynamics which makes the control scheme sufficiently fast for real-time applications. Computer simulation study performed for the 7-DOF slave arm shows that the developed control scheme can efficiently adapt to sudden change in payload while tracking various test trajectories such as ramp or sinusoids with negligible position errors.

Nguyen, Charles C.↗

Recent advances in computational mathematics and applications

We are honored to bring you this special issue dedicated to recent advances in computational mathematics and applications in science and engineering. The papers in this special issue were presented in ”Conference on Computational Mathematics and Applications (CCMA)” held at the University of Nevada Las Vegas (UNLV) during October 25–27, 2019. The conference has attracted about 90 attendees from six countries. The 15 papers in the special issue comprise a diverse collection of theoretical numerical analysis as well as applications in various subjects. Topics cover optimal control of PDEs, discontinuous Galerkin methods, fluid flow in porous media, turbulence flow, static and moving interface problems, complex fluids composed by the mixture of Newtonian fluid and nematic (liquid crystal) flows, modeling of ocean–atmosphere system, image segmentation algorithm, uncertainty quantification problems for turbulence model and Maxwell’s equations, iterative solver for systems resulting from mixed methods, and novel methods for solving systems of nonlinear equations. As the Guest Editors we would like to thank Dr. Leland Jameson at NSF (National Science Foundation) for kindly supporting our conference proposal which made this conference possible. We would also like to thank Darren Sugrue from Elsevier who provided partial support for our conference, and Thennarasu Gunasekaran and his production team from Elsevier who produced this nice special issue. We are grateful to many people (Dr. Zhijian Wu, Lori Ornelas, Elsa Juarez, and many Ph.D. students) at the Department of Mathematical Sciences of UNLV who provided tremendous support for the conference. Finally, we very much appreciate all authors who contributed their precious results to this special issue.

97 MATHEMATICS AND COMPUTING↗

Design of an adaptive controller for a telerobot manipulator

The design of a joint-space adaptive control scheme is presented for controlling the slave arm motion of a dual-arm telerobot system developed at Goddard Space Flight Center (GSFC) to study telerobotic operations in space. Each slave arm of the dual-arm system is a kinematically redundant manipulator with 7 degrees of freedom (DOF). Using the concept of model reference adaptive control (MRAC) and Lyapunov direct method, an adatation algorithm is derived which adjusts the PD controller gains of the control scheme. The development of the adaptive control scheme assumes that the slave arm motion is non-compliant and slowly-varying. The implementation of the derived control scheme does not need the computation of the manipulator dynamics, which makes the control scheme sufficiently fast for real-time applications. Computer simulation study performed for the 7-DOF slave arm shows that the developed control scheme can efficiently adapt to sudden change in payloads while tracking various test trajectories such as ramp or sinusoids with negligible position errors.

Nguyen, Charles C.↗

Teacher Enhancement Institute

In a team building, team teaching strategy with four faculty, can learning strategies such as educational technology and problem based learning be provided to forty local teachers of primary, elementary, and secondary students? The impetus for the effort is to provide information about science and engineering at NASA and motivate students to pursue careers in science and technology. Teachers, identified and selected through a rigorous application procedure, participated in a two week workshop for a graduate credit. Teachers were exposed to computer applications such as INTERNET, MOSAIC, Power Machintosh word processing, NASA scientists, and laboratory experiments. Teachers were evaluated on level and quality of their participation, design of teacher application materials and relevant lesson plans and presentations. The results show that teachers, regardless of preparation and background, can learn science and engineering applications and develop relevant materials to transfer information to their classroom. Follow-up during the academic year will show that teachers are successfully using materials.

Simmons, Ron W.↗

CESDIS

CESDIS, the Center of Excellence in Space Data and Information Sciences was developed jointly by NASA, Universities Space Research Association (USRA), and the University of Maryland in 1988 to focus on the design of advanced computing techniques and data systems to support NASA Earth and space science research programs. CESDIS is operated by USRA under contract to NASA. The Director, Associate Director, Staff Scientists, and administrative staff are located on-site at NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland. The primary CESDIS mission is to increase the connection between computer science and engineering research programs at colleges and universities and NASA groups working with computer applications in Earth and space science. The 1993-94 CESDIS year included a broad range of computer science research applied to NASA problems. This report provides an overview of these research projects and programs as well as a summary of the various other activities of CESDIS in support of NASA and the university research community, We have had an exciting and challenging year.

Source record↗

Compressed optimization of device architectures

Recent advances in nanotechnology have enabled researchers to control individual quantum mechanical objects with unprecedented accuracy, opening the door for both quantum and extreme- scale conventional computation applications. As these devices become more complex, designing for facility of control becomes a daunting and computationally infeasible task. Here, motivated by ideas from compressed sensing, we introduce a protocol for the Compressed Optimization of Device Architectures (CODA). It leads naturally to a metric for benchmarking and optimizing device designs, as well as an automatic device control protocol that reduces the operational complexity required to achieve a particular output. Because this protocol is both experimentally and computationally efficient, it is readily extensible to large systems. For this paper, we demonstrate both the bench- marking and device control protocol components of CODA through examples of realistic simulations of electrostatic quantum dot devices, which are currently being developed experimentally for quantum computation.

71 CLASSICAL AND QUANTUM MECHANICS, GENERAL PHYSIC↗

Big PanDa Workflow Management on Titan for High Energy and Nuclear Physics and for Future Extreme Scale Scientific Application

Over a three year period, from 2016-2019, this project demonstrated the scientific benefits of integrating the Titan supercomputer at Oak Ridge Leadership Computing Facility into traditional high throughput grid based distributed computing systems managed by PanDA, the workflow management system used for the execution of all distributed computing applications by the ATLAS experiment at the Large Hadron Collider. PanDA manages millions of batch jobs daily at hundreds of clusters worldwide on request by thousands of physicist users, and processes more than an exabyte of data annually using grid middleware. High levels of operational use of Titan was sustained by PanDA in order to meet the physics goals of ATLAS. The success of this project led to the use of other supercomputers worldwide by ATLAS, and to the adoption of PanDA by other experiments and other scientists. Multiple innovative operational and computer science research goals were achieved supporting the use of supercomputers for scientific domains with large scale distributed data and distributed processing needs.

97 MATHEMATICS AND COMPUTING↗

Integrating Sudo-Kaminaga Correlation to the Safety Analysis Code PARET-ANL

The accuracy and reliability of the reactor safety analysis code are critical because the specifications of the safety systems will depend on the analytical results for initiating events that could occur to the reactor. In safety analyses for power reactors, there exist many proficient and applicable computer codes such as RELAP5, CATHARE, RETRAN, or CATHENA. For non-power research reactors, an issue arises, however, due to lacking of such specialized codes. As a result, computer codes developed for the transient analysis of power reactors need to be applied carefully after proving their applicability to a specified research reactor. The safety analysis discussed in this paper concerns the prevention of fuel damage in hypothetical accidental scenarios for the new research reactor design at National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST). One fuel integrity criterion is analyzed by investigating the Minimum Critical Heat Flux Ratio (MCHFR) in the core during the accidental transients. Some previous studies develop a relationship that correlates the nominal value of the minimum CHFR with the probability of CHF occurring and causing fuel damage. Using a statistical approach, the nominal value of the MCHFR for the low-enriched uranium (LEU) reactor needs to remain above the recommended limiting value to better ensure the safety of the research reactor. The probability of no fuel failure increases as the MCHFR increases. More importantly, as long as the MCHFR remains above the recommended limiting value of 1.301, the reactor will have a 90% probability that CHF is not reached. The safety analysis program PARET, developed by Argonne National Laboratory (ANL), is employed to obtain the CHFR information in this study. PARET/ANL is a digital computer programming code intended primarily for the analysis of test and research reactors that use plate-type (flat) fuel elements. This program has its own set of correlations that are used to calculate the CHFR. One of them is the Mirshak correlation, which was believed to provide the best estimation of the critical heat flux under the operating conditions of the new reactor at the time. Following the critical heat flux (CHF) experiments for vertical rectangular channels in the JRR-3 (Japan Research Reactor unit 3), the CHF calculations now use the Sudo- Kaminaga correlation. This correlation is of our interest because this method has an enhanced geometric similarity and an increased range of applicability that are more representative of the actual operating conditions of our current design, and has a more mechanistic approach [9]. Since the source code of PARET/ANL is inaccessible, a MATLAB-based utility has been written to integrate the Sudo-Kaminaga correlation as a substitute for the Mirshak correlation in the code. As a result, both the Mirshak and the Sudo-Kaminaga correlations are used to analyze the standard output from the PARET program to calculate the CHFR.

11 NUCLEAR FUEL CYCLE AND FUEL MATERIALS↗